I sit until the house bells turn the night into hour marks and the path back into habit. When I stand, my knees complain like old friends. I turn my back to the river and the cliff and the honest dark and walk toward the lemon and the light and the people who will require myYesfor a little longer. The form is submitted. The machine has my name in its throat. I will finish the ritual, hand over the keys, say the polite words, and go where the uniform sends me.
I cannot see a life without her. I will live it anyway until something more breakable than me breaks.
That is the choice.
CHAPTER 12
STAR
Mother’s voice carries like a violin string down the service corridor—sweet, precise, impossible to ignore when it’s tuned that tight.
“…and expedite his clearance,” she’s saying to one of the household aides, low but sharp as lemon. “If Commander Rayek intends to depart, I won’t have the gossip rag piecing it together before we do.”
I stop so fast the tray I’m not carrying rattles in my hands. The corridor smells like starched linen and citrus polish; the air is cool on my cheeks, too cool, like I’ve fallen into a cellar. The aide murmurs something deferential. Paper shuffles. Mother’s bracelets click as she gestures. “Tonight? No. After the ambassador’s supper. Sneed has the armory inventory ready for his sign-off.”
The words are clean and civilized and they fillet me right under the ribs.
No. No, no, no.
I back into the alcove by the linen press and press my palm to the panel because HouseNet is the only god that will answer quick. The holo blooms in pale blue, waiting like an obedient dog. My fingers move without permission, muscle memoryfrom a childhood spent snooping for fun and then for survival—family directory, personnel, Household Guard assignments, query: Rayek, Cmdr., active. A prompt throws up a polite red bar—Restricted—then remembers I’m me and peels open like silky fruit.
There it is. Line item: Transfer Request: PlanDef East Garrison. Status: Acknowledged. Clearance: Pending Exit Interview. Effective date: blank, but the system has already bricked his badge to a sunset code. My heartbeat goes staccato in my throat; the blue light makes my hands look ghost-pale. There’s a digital signature from Sneed, precise as his mouth. The file is so official it might as well be a tomb.
For a second I’m certain this is a prank, a new flavor of CynJyn’s chaos. Then the screen blurs, and I realize it’s because my eyes do. I blink hard and the letters steady, damning and neat. he’s leaving.
The world narrows to three points: the lemon in my nose; the cold halo of holo light on my fingers; the red throbbing in my ears that’s not an alarm, it’s me. “No,” I say to the air, to Mother, to the universe. “No.”
I don’t remember throwing the panel closed. I do remember the slick of the floor under my feet as I pivot. The corridor seems too long and too narrow at the same time; the stone runners grin up with their polite patterns. A footman steps into my path with a tray; I go around him without seeing his face, a fish between reeds, a comet between everyone else’s plans. “My Lady—” he starts. I’m already gone. Somewhere a bell strikes the quarter hour. Somewhere a door opens. I don’t care. My pulse is a hammer. The west wing smells like oil and wool and the old earth of the stones that pretended they were a castle long before we called them one.
The armory door is half-ajar. The hum of inventory readers leaks out—thin electronic chimes, a list being checked, thedomestic sound of order. I slam the door wide and the scent hits me: oiled leather, solvent, hot metal, the ghost of battle stuck in the grooves of a workbench. He’s there, broad back to me, sleeves pushed, a scanner in one hand and a crate open at his hip. The scars laddering his forearm are pale in the yellow light. My breath stumbles.
“What the hell is this?” I hear my voice before I feel my throat. It ricochets off stone and blade, angrier than I meant, exact as I feel. I hold up my slate. The transfer notice glares like a second sun.
Rayek turns. Gold eyes. The slow focus that means he very carefully does not startle like a cornered animal. His gaze drops to the holo, then lifts to my face. A shutter slides behind his expression, thin and infuriating. “It’s none of your concern,” he says, voice low, roughened by disuse and whatever he left in that shuttle bay.
“I’m your principal,” I snap. “It is literally my concern. You’re my guard.”
“I am a guard,” he corrects, the words clipped clean. “Not your?—”
“Say it,” I bite. “Go on. Not your anything?”
His jaw flexes; something old and patient in him flinches. “This is an administrative process,” he says, so calm it’s an insult. “You shouldn’t be looking at personnel files.”
“My mother just told an aide to expedite your clearance,” I throw back. “I didn’t break into a vault, Rayek. I had to scroll past three menus and not throw up.”
He sets the scanner down with more gentleness than it deserves, like it might bruise. “Then you know what it says.”
“I know what it says,” I spit. “I want to know what it means.”
“It means I will be posted where my skills are better used,” he answers, like he’s reading from a manual. “It means you will be safe. It means?—”
“Don’t you dare,” I say, stepping into him so fast the air between us goes hot. “Don’t you dare make this about my safety to avoid telling me why you’re running.”
His mouth tightens, a line drawn with a blade. “I am not running.”
“You submitted without telling me,” I say. “You watched me walk this house like a condemned thing and you said nothing. You stood on that balcony and you said nothing. You watched me laugh with a man who isn’t you and said nothing, and then you—” My voice breaks. Fury rushes in to cover the crack. “That’s not honor, Rayek. That’s cowardice with good posture.”
He lifts his head like the accusation hit and he won’t let it show. “Watch yourself.”
